All Rise...

Editor's Note

The Charge

Are you unbreakable?

Opening Statement

M. Night Shyamalan's much-anticipated follow-up to The Sixth Sense again finds Bruce
Willis playing a man trying to make sense of the bizarre circumstances in which
he finds himself. Where The Sixth Sense used the device of a ghost story,
Unbreakable dallies with the concept of comic-book superheroes, but in a
dramatically different (which is not necessarily to say "better") way
than any comics-based film before it. And, as in his previous film, Shyamalan
stacks the deck so he can whip back the curtain and shock the Wizard with a
surprise (maybe) ending. Does lightning strike twice for the Philadelphia
Kid?

Facts of the Case

David "don't-call-me-Addison" Dunn (Bruce Willis), like Peter
Parker before the arachnid attack, is a guy "who could be you,"
leading a nebbishy existence as a security guard with a dissolving marriage and
no future. Once a collegiate football superstar destined for gridiron greatness
until an auto accident ended his athletic career, David now slogs through his
dull gray day-to-day, a real nowhere man living in a nowhere land. Then one
fateful evening, as he returns home from a job interview in New York, David's
commuter train derails, killing everyone on board except—hey, quit reading
ahead—David, a "sole survivor" who is "miraculously
unharmed."

In the wake of his incredible turn of good fortune, David is puzzled by a
note left on the windshield of his car during a memorial for the trainwreck
victims—it reads simply: "How many days of your life have you been
sick?" David, as it happens, doesn't remember, nor does his wife (Robin
Wright Penn, the one-time Princess Bride looking almost as unglamourous
as Carol Kane's wizened crone in that classic film). The man who inscribed the
card, a whacked-out comic art dealer named Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson with
hair time-warped from the heyday of the American Basketball Association and
wardrobe—cane included—on loan from Willy Wonka), doesn't think
David ever has been sick, and indeed may be impervious to illness or injury, the
aforementioned car crash notwithstanding. Elijah himself is afflicted with a
rare genetic disorder (osteogenesis imperfecta) that leaves his bones as brittle
as glass. He is obsessed with the idea that for every person as weak and frail
as himself, there must be another who is—the score
swells—"unbreakable." (The film opens with Elijah's
birth—his arms and legs shattered in the exit process—and flashes
back at a later point to his youth, when his mother—touchingly portrayed
by Charlayne Woodard until she shows up in some seriously bad old-age drag late
in the film—introduces Elijah to comics as a device to help him overcome
his well-founded fear of injury.)

The evidence begins to mount that Elijah may be right about David, who
exhibits previously untapped reserves of physical strength and has eerie flashes
of insight about people with whom he comes into contact. Dunn's son (Spencer
Treat Clark, a young actor so strikingly reminiscent of Haley Joel Osment I kept
waiting for him to see dead people) is convinced, and decides to test Elijah's
theory by pulling a revolver on his own man. David, though, recalling a
childhood near-drowning experience, remains reluctant to believe he's the
incarnation of Clark Kent. The "is-he-or-isn't-he-superhuman" debate
between David, his son, and the mysterious Elijah Price, drives the film to its
denouement.

The Evidence

I may be out on a promontory by my lonesome here, but I wasn't all that wowed
by The Sixth Sense. A nifty exercise
in atmosphere and style, to be sure, but because I—unlike millions of
ticket-buying Americans, apparently—had seen Carnival of Souls way back when, I glommed
onto the big finale by the end of the opening scene. [If you haven't seen The
Sixth Sense yet, but have seen Carnival of Souls, then (a) I'm sorry
to blow the surprise for you and (b) you owe me your eternal gratitude for
giving you back two hours of your life you might have eventually wasted on
The Sixth Sense. Then again, since almost nobody these days has seen
Carnival of Souls, I'm guessing I'm apologizing to the air here.]
Shyamalan didn't catch me napping with Unbreakable, either, because I was
collecting Marvel Comics before M. Night was born, and knew there was only one
place this story could wind up. But I enjoyed it considerably more than his
other movie, at least until the final scene.

Shyamalan assumes a couple of huge risks with Unbreakable. First, he
chances alienating people who've heard that the film is about a comic-book-style
hero and are expecting another installment in the Batman franchise, or an action spectacular
on the order of X-Men. Unbreakable
is diametrically opposite of those pictures—a quiet, reflective,
low-energy film similar in feel to the director's earlier hit. Second, Shyamalan
gambles that people who don't give a rip about comics and would leap across the
street in a single bound to avoid a movie about them will somehow tumble to the
fact that even though he uses the thesis of comics to develop his characters and
story, the film isn't remotely comic-booky. Cineastes who enjoy character-driven
drama might enjoy Unbreakable. The bottom line is that Shyamalan made a
film that won't appeal to the people who think it's about what it isn't about,
and that won't draw the people who would probably like what it really is about.
It's a risk worth taking, but I wouldn't have the first clue how to market it.
Apparently, the studio didn't either, seeing that Unbreakable was
something of a disappointment at the box office.

Willis does yet another turn on his "other" character. By
"other" I mean the one who isn't David Addison/John McClane/Hudson
Hawk/Korben Dallas, the shoot-from-the-lip wiseacre who laughs in the face of
danger. Instead, David Dunn is another iteration of the character Willis assayed
in such films as Last Man Standing and, yes, The Sixth Sense: the
grim, laconic loner with melancholy eyes. (I haven't seen much evidence yet that
Willis has an on-screen character who isn't a take on one of these two or an
amalgam of both. Doesn't make him a bad actor—in fact, I invariably enjoy
his work—but like, say, Kevin Costner, he has a very specific range.)
Jackson's character, by contrast, is a major freakfest, and there were moments
when I thought Samuel L. was creeping precariously close to the edge of parody.
Both characterizations make sense in the context of Shyamalan's vision, but
Elijah is so weird and David so subdued that the connection between them never
quite rings authentic (kind of like the connection between Willis' McClane and
Jackson's Zeus Carver in Die Hard With A
Vengeance). I was, though, impressed by the nuance Robin Wright Penn brought
to her character, especially in the sequence where she and David go on a
"date" to rekindle their dying relationship. How many actresses today
will allow themselves to be photographed looking as haggard and world-weary as
Wright Penn does here? Yet her essential underlying strength and beauty shine
through.

I found Unbreakable to be hugely disappointing when I saw it in the
theater—dull, slow, and disaffecting. Having watched it a few times
through on DVD, I've warmed to it somewhat, and find it a more mature and
emotionally developed work than The Sixth Sense. But I've gotta nail
Shyamalan on two things.

First: the "trick" ending bites. It bites big time. It masticates
like the rats in Willard. I've given up
trying to suss out what M. Night was thinking when he said, "Let's end it
like THIS!" other than he'd been tapping into the stash of his dope dealer
cameo character from the film. Even though I intuited early on how the
resolution would turn out, the execution is botched so wretchedly that any good
karma the movie builds up in the first 100 minutes is flushed down the commode
of artistic license in the final seven.

Second: I don't believe M. Night "gets" what superhero comics are
about AT ALL, any more than the no-talent hacks responsible for Batman (Seems
Like It Goes On) Forever and Batman
and Robin (You Blind), "got it." Unbreakable drains the
concept of the comics medium of nearly all its color, fire and life. The first
Christopher Reeve Superman film got
it. Tim Burton's two Batman films got it—I'm not a fan of Burton's
approach particularly, but he clearly understood what his central character was
about. From what I've seen of the soon-to-be-released Spider-Man, Sam Raimi apparently gets
it. I understand that cinema is cinema and comics are comics and the two media
are worlds apart, but when I see cinema that draws its thematic foundation from
comics, I'd like to think the director had actually read a few. According to
interviews, M. Night is an avid comics reader. You couldn't tell by this film.
Unbreakable feels like a movie made by someone who studied a doctoral
dissertation about comics by some Ivy League sociology professor, not by an
adult who as a child often trembled with wide-eyed excitement at the glorious
artwork of Kirby, Ditko, and John Romita Sr., or the hyperbolic words of Stan
Lee and Roy Thomas.

The Disney conglomerate, unrelentingly bipolar about the DVD medium, used
the release of Unbreakable to launch their VISTA Series packaging.
According to the notes, VISTA stands for "Vision, Imagination, Style,
Theme, Artistry." Whatever. The anamorphic widescreen transfer of the film
itself on Disc One of the two-disc set is fine but unremarkable. Shyamalan and
cinematographer Eduardo Serra use a muted color palette throughout, and much of
the action is shot at night or in diffuse light, so there's not much sparkle to
show off. A hint of graininess and shimmer crop up here and there in the
transfer, and there's some serious edge enhancement going on in spots,
especially in the relative handful of brighter scenes. (Memo to Disney: hire
some people that actually like DVD and know what they're doing with it. If
you're going to be in it, be in it to win it.) Most undiscriminating eyes won't
notice anything untoward. The soundtrack is available in both Dolby Digital 5.1
and DTS. I only listened to the former, and as with the video found it
acceptable but nothing to shout about. There's sufficient separation in the
discrete channels when it's called for by the action, but to paraphrase
Travolta's angel in Michael, this ain't that kind of movie. I don't
usually pay much attention to the score—which makes sense, because if
you're noticing the score the film probably reeks—but James Newton
Howard's music is appropriately understated and plays nicely here.

The much-touted VISTA extras (mostly on Disc Two) are an interesting mix,
but disappointing given the hype. Just call it a Special Edition and be done
with it, for crying out loud! A 15-minute documentary piece entitled
"Behind the Scenes" is pretty much standard-issue publicity kit fare.
Far more compelling for us comics aficionados is "Comic Books and
Superheroes," a 20-minute collection of interview clips featuring a number
of legendary comics creators, including Will Eisner (The Spirit), Denny O'Neil
(Green Lantern/Green Arrow), Alan Moore (Watchmen), Frank Miller (Daredevil),
and others. Samuel L. Jackson, evidently something of a comics maven himself,
also appears. This item alone, for me, was worth the price of the set.

Shyamalan introduces a series of seven scenes deleted from the eventual
release. His comments are animated and generally interesting, and the scenes, to
Disney's credit, are completely finished pieces of film, not stuff that looks
like someone scraped it off the bottom of the editor's wastebasket. In addition,
one key scene that appears in the movie is presented in a multi-angle format,
allowing the viewer to compare the original storyboards to the completed camera
shots. It's an educational view of the way the transition occurs from the
director's internal visualization of a scene to final film. Both discs also
contain effectively designed interactive menus, complete with sound—if you
view a lot of DVDs you see quite a bit of this kind of thing, but these menus
rank with some of the better ones I've encountered.

As on The Sixth Sense DVD, Shyamalan includes a short home video he
made when he was a kid. Night: stop it. Stop it right now. We don't want to
endure your cinematic fingerpainting every time you release a movie. We get it,
okay—you grew up to be a talented filmmaker. I grew up to be a writer, but
you don't see me posting stuff on the Web I wrote when I was in junior high. You
remind me of people who send out those annoying letters every Christmas that
detail every time a family member scratched, sneezed, or belched during the
previous twelve months. Get over yourself.

Oh yeah: the "two collectible Alex Ross illustrations" are a
double-sided lithographed postcard by the guy who did "Marvels" and
"Kingdom Come" (comics fans will know the name). Big deal.

The Rebuttal Witnesses

No commentary track. I guess M. Night figures we'd rather bask in his glory
through his face-to-face introductory snippets than just listen to him babble
for two hours without actually having to stare at him. But didn't anyone else
who helped create this pic want to chat about it? Bruce? Sam? Anybody? And I'd
bet dollars against Krispy Kremes that I once saw a trailer for
Unbreakable…but I sure didn't see it on either of these discs.

Closing Statement

A well-made—if not well-conceived, in my opinion—film that either
resonates with you or doesn't. I found it growing on me after repeated viewings,
but not enough to recommend it by itself. But the sensitive performances by
Willis, Jackson, Wright Penn, Woodard, and young Spencer Treat Clark are worth
seeing, and for the true fan of sequential storytelling the "Comic Books
and Superheroes" short is keeper material. If you don't despise its ending
as much as I do, Unbreakable might just fill a rainy afternoon. Just
don't come expecting to believe a man can fly.

The Verdict

The Mouse House is found guilty of monumental hubris over the whole
"VISTA Series" debacle. M. Night Shyamalan is found guilty of not
knowing what to do with the last ten pages of his script. The exceptional cast
and crew are free to go. We're adjourned.